Portable play pens or play area units have long been used to provide a safe area within which a young child can play without the constant attention of an adult. Kiddie Yard from Nu-Line Industries of Suring, Wis. and Crawl-Space from the Crawl-Space division of Con-Serv, Inc. of Cincinnati, Ohio are multiple panel units for creating a play area for young children. In those units each panel has a rigid rectangular frame and adjacent panels are connected by a hinge structure at the top and bottom of the panels, permitting the panels to be pivoted with respect to each other at the hinge. This permits the play area to be made in different shapes, for example to conform to the open area available in a living room of a home, and permits the panels to be folded up in a face-to-face relation to make the unit portable. However, each of these play area units is made with a fixed number of panels and the panels are permanently held together.